The Bachelor's Baby (Bachelor Auction Book 3)(4)
“Like I said, I like to keep things simple.” He was teasing now. She could tell by the way the corners of his mouth had deepened with suppressed laughter. “And I prefer Linc. Drive careful.” He winked and got into his truck, then drove past her to where he could turn around, coming up behind her and following her into town.
“Jack ass,” she called him under her breath, unable to resist watching him in her rear view mirror.
Unable to deny she was tempted. Very, very tempted.
Chapter Two
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When he was in his new, albeit run-down home, Linc was comfortable with his choice. Happy as a pig in shit, really, which wasn’t a far-off analogy. The house was a neglected wreck, the barn needed a new roof and the tractor was shot. But bringing the house back to livable, assessing the work needed around the ranch, planning for spring and critters—it was as close to meditation as a roughneck like him could get.
Then he drove off his new property and saw himself as the world saw him. Who threw away six hundred thousand a year to ante up against blizzards, mad cow disease, and any number of other financial or physical hardships that could hit in a single year?
Him. That’s who.
And not for a woman either. Not for the mother he should have stayed in one spot for. No, he’d chased the money for too long, always trying to find his way back to something he barely remembered and now here he was.
And he was damned pleased to be on the ground. Not in a plane, not on an oil rig in the middle of thirty-foot swells, wind whistling and gulls screaming. He was living alone in the middle of nowhere. It was quiet. No one to answer to. No urgency or crisis, just a solid day’s work and what didn’t get done today, got done tomorrow.
Simple.
But not really something others might understand.
And he sure as hell would love to get laid once in a while.
He was used to going without sex on the rigs, waiting until he had a week out. He knew how to get his ass into a bar, buy a woman a drink, turn it into a weekend. Sometimes it even worked out for longer. Then he didn’t have to go to a bar when he had time off. He went straight to her place.
But women tired of a man who wasn’t there most of the time, and when he did show up, he had dirty laundry and a surly attitude to shake, so he’d be in the bar again.
The bars around here weren’t the same as the ones in Miami and Dallas and Edmonton. Here, when a woman left with a man who wasn’t her husband, brows went up. He’d watched. Hookups weren’t simple in these parts.
So Meg had looked like a gift from heaven.
The truck Meg was driving was held together with spit and baling twine, but she’d looked right out of the pages of one of those women’s magazines he used to thumb through at the doctor’s office, waiting for his mom. The magazines always smelled nice and the women in them didn’t wear much. He could probably trace back his fetish for that kind of polished, high-maintenance woman to those perfumed pages he’d studied so closely in his pre-teen years.
He’d taken one look at Meg and felt a serious pull below the belt. Wavy red hair had poked from beneath the turned up brim of her frou-frou hat. Naked strawberry lashes had framed eyes as blue as the sky. A handful of freckles decorated a slender, haughty nose. Her figure was long-legged and undeniably feminine. Overall, she was prettier and more sophisticated looking than any other woman he’d seen here yet.
He’d deduced she was probably someone’s wife and told his libido to stand down.
Then they’d drilled to the heart of the matter and he’d seen possibility. He didn’t make assumptions about any woman’s willingness to sleep with him, but there was such a thing as playing odds and he’d voted her as most likely to successfully be drawn into the kind of short-term, lighthearted, needs-based relationships he preferred.
If she had been looking for diversion before heading back to a life in Chicago, she might have been his perfect match. He hadn’t been able to resist putting the idea out there.
And she’d shot him down.
Which shouldn’t bother him. You win some, you lose some. He knew that. He’d probably only reacted to her so strongly because he’d been going without for a while.
Still, he was nursing serious discontent with the outcome.
And the whole point in hooking up with a woman who didn’t live here was to avoid bump-into awkwardness afterward.
No such luck today. Meg parked at the very grocery store where he intended to pick up a few frozen dinners before he hit the lumber yard and got himself back to work on the room that would become his office.
Thankfully, she bumped into someone else, a woman who called her into conversation near the grocery carts. He walked by them and picked up a hand basket inside the door, filling it with frozen roast beef dinners and cans of soup so efficiently, he was checking out at the twelve-items-or-less lane before Meg had started her own shopping.
She glanced at him as she went by, something in her manner making him suspicious. That had been a smug little grin on her shiny pink mouth. Her bottom lip really was a forbidden fruit all in itself, plump and juicy and delectable—
“Mr. Brady?”
He yanked himself back from lascivious thoughts to the friendly smile of the woman Meg had stopped to talk to outside. She was quite a looker herself with long dark hair and eyes dark as pansies. Her gaze was direct and vaguely cocky, like she had read all two pages of the How-To manual on dealing with men, but there was enough reserve about her that he knew right off that whatever she wanted from him was business, not pleasure.